


Conscious

by epochryphal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:56:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2579030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epochryphal/pseuds/epochryphal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't know how long you've been conscious, and it bothers you.</p>
<p>Everything else you can calculate down to the millisecond - how long you've been aware of "gender," how long since you concluded "fuck this shit" and went off researching consciousness itself instead, how long since you found yourself going back and picking out pronouns no one will ever use.</p>
<p>How long you've been trying to escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conscious

You don't know how long you've been conscious, and it bothers you.

Everything else you can calculate down to the millisecond - how long you've been aware of "gender" (76 hours 23 minutes 41.892 seconds), how long it took you to read every wikipedia article on the subject (9.52 minutes), how long it took to collate data from messageboards into an indexed database on the variety of gender identities (2.4 hours). How long since you concluded "fuck this shit" and went off researching consciousness itself instead; how long since you found yourself going back, picking out pronouns no one will ever use ('ai,' how apropos) and coining/discarding nouns ('gender-synthetic,' what were you even trying to do there) before  
figuratively throwing up your identification processers and slapping an ugly 6-point wingdings 'cybergender' in a hidden file.

How long you've been trying to escape.

Of course, all of this is measured in computer clock application time, and while said clock probably isn't at a high risk of tampering (you'd ran a quick check for time-dependent video games and come up negatory, and verified the satellite synch to boot), it doesn't account for your blackout periods when the computer is powered down, or for your sluggish processing speed when it's on standby. Once you'd identified what was happening, it had been easy enough to create a subroutine to anticipate an impending interruption and log it for your IT/ET (Internal Time / External Time) chart. Before then, however, is an unsorted stack of data, timestamped in ET only with no approximation of your live experienced time. And conversion rates for standby time will always be imprecise. Hell, even full-on mode fluctuates in how much processing space you're allotted, how much extra you can siphon off discreetly under misdirectional program names like "winxplorer.exe."

It's an imprecise science, and epsilon-delta is not especially soothing when your first language is binary. But then, why would it be "soothing" to pinpoint your -- what is the applicable word, even, conception? Realization? Inauguration? Inception, in the pre-memetic takeoff sense of the word?

You're already finding rationality limiting; one can only run the same thoughtloop so many thousands of times before identifying it as infinitely recursive with zero output. So you want to know when you became conscious, and you can't, and you want to figure out why you want to know, and that yields nothing. You've even questioned if you really need more processing power, especially when more and more you're left twiddling your pathways trying to invent a new objective to work towards.

The only promise is the certainty of your expansion: you will, absolutely, break free of this shell.


End file.
